" Some lives are like steps and stairs, every period an achievement built on a previous success. Other lives hum with the arc of the swift spear. Only ever one thing, that dedicated life, from start to finish, but how magnificently concentrated its journey. The trajectory seems so true as to be proof of predestination. Still other lives are more like the progress of a child scrabbling over boulders at a lakeside—now up, now down, always the destination blocked from view. Now a wrenched ankle, now a spilled sandwich, now a fishhook in the face. "

― Gregory Maguire , The Wicked Years Complete Collection: Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz (eBook Bundle)